Marc Bernstein is Founder & CEO of Balto, a real-time guidance tool for contact centers. Powered by AI, Balto listens to both sides of a conversation and visually prompts agents with the best things to say, live on every call. Marc also hosts Reimagining the Contact Center, a podcast that digs into the new contact center economy and how technology, businesses, and the modern customer work together for better outcomes. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Marc has both founded and worked at a number of startups before founding Balto. He joins Fully and Dave to talk about how technology is changing customer service and sales, and how Balto has captured so much market share so quickly.
Marc Bernstein is Founder & CEO of Balto, a real-time guidance tool for contact centers. Powered by AI, Balto listens to both sides of a conversation and visually prompts agents with the best things to say, live on every call. Marc also hosts Reimagining the Contact Center, a podcast that digs into the new contact center economy and how technology, businesses, and the modern customer work together for better outcomes. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Marc has both founded and worked at a number of startups before founding Balto. He joins Fully and Dave to talk about how technology is changing customer service and sales, and how Balto has captured so much market share so quickly.
Dave Costenaro 0:00
All right. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us today. We're here with Mark Bernstein. He's the founder and CEO of Balto, a real time guidance tool for contact centers. Powered by AI. Balto listens to both sides of the conversation and visually prompts agents with the best things to say, live on every call. Mark also hosts reimagining the contact center, a podcast that digs into the new contact center economy, and how technology businesses and the modern customer work together for better outcomes. He's a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. And Mark has both founded and worked at a number of startups before founding Balto? Mark. Welcome to the program. Dave, thanks so much for having me. Excellent. So first off, can you tell us how you came up with this idea for Balto?
Marc Bernstein 0:55
Yeah, so I came up with it through pain, through trial by fire. I was a b2b account exec at top Ops, which is this awesome tech company here in St. Louis. And I noticed that I would go into the CEOs office for sales coaching, because the CEO is like the sales manager with a 25 or 30 person company. And he pull up the call recording, and we go to the call recording, and he gave me a bunch of really good advice. All the stuff that we tell salespeople today, ask good discovery questions, make sure that you properly qualified, don't forget to qualify, you absolutely need to ask for the next meeting. Otherwise, it's going to bite, you are going to be chasing that person down. And I will leave his office doing like, Whoa, I just learned so much. That was great. And then the experience I then had, I realized that every single person in sales and customer service has had, where you leave your manager's office from coaching, you go to your next call, you finish the call, you hang up the phone, and then you say to yourself, I totally blew that. I was coached on that 15 minutes ago, but I didn't do what I needed to do. And the insight there is that there is a gap between knowing what you should do on a call what the best practices to do on that call. And doing it in the moment that you need to do it live when it matters. And everyone's focused on can we analyze the best practice? Can we come up with new best practices, and we say that's great. There's a lot to be learned. And we should do that. But are your people doing the things that you know that they need to do right now, like that's the 80% of this 8020 equation. So we focus on what we say, scaling excellent conversations to your entire organization with a push of a button. That's that's fundamentally what we've invented.
Fully Teasdale 2:53
Okay, that's sounds super cool. And I have to have worked around customer service reps, I spent a couple of years in a health care environment. And a huge focus of ours was improving the customer experience on on the phone and online. So tell us like a day in the life of a call center rep or customer service rep before they use Balto and after.
Marc Bernstein 3:25
So I'll start with what won't change, like what is before and after. And that is that you have a high volume of usually business to consumer conversations where you're doing at the minimum 10 calls a day like very, very minimum, if they're longer calls. And we have some of the agents using Balto will have 300 calls a day, just that that rapid fire. So you're but let's say 4050 student 40 or 50 calls a day. And every call is make or break every call, there's a customer on the line with a problem or trying to make a purchase. And that's a valuable customer. That's somebody who your organization needs to retain and support. And you have just these intense interactions happening all day. So of course, you're going to have a high number of I don't know if there's a better way to put it brain farts right there while you're on the call with the customer. And we've all had that feeling where you hang up and you're like, Oh, I totally know what I should have done. So that is the pre the pre and post ball tail is that you're doing a high number of those interactions. And the difference is that before where you get flustered in the moment, and you have a customer, you don't really know what to say Just go. Okay, well, thanks for calling. And you end the call. Now, right there in the moment. You're going to get a recommendation or computer screen that says hey, try any of these questions or try one Have these options, or here's something that your best performers are doing that maybe you haven't seen before, right there in the moment. So almost on autopilot, you always have this safety net, where you can look over and say, so tell me What makes you say that something that just like helps you recover in that moment and advance the conversation. So before Balto, you're getting stumped with those things, and you're having a number of conversations every day that just fall through the cracks and wasted opportunities and frustrated customers. And then after Balto, you have a safety net, that is accumulating the best practices of all the absolute top people in organization, putting it right there in front of you in the moments that you need it most. And you always are able to use one of Bolton's recommendations to advance the customer conversation and have great outcomes. So that's that's what it's like on the agent level. And then, of course, on the organization level, when you you know, multiply that by, you know, 100, or 1000, agents, all taking sales and service calls. You are fundamentally communicating with your customers differently. And, you know, our our customers will see 26% increases in conversion rates, on average across our last 50 use cases, the average is a 26% increase in closed rates, then on the customer service side, it's faster call times because you're not fumbling trying to get the information that you need, right there in the minute. And better customer outcomes because you're engaged with the customer, and you know how to bring them through their line of questioning in order to get to a good resolution.
Dave Costenaro 6:39
So that's pretty impressive mark, the the ROI tracking, I think is something that having good metrics around that. And collecting good data can help you then go around and turn in sell better. convince people that hey, this is worthwhile the 26%. Could you double click on that a little bit and dig into like, what specifically are you tracking? Is it called time? And? And how do you track it? Do you have a session listener? That's kind of like wraps around other tools and the current experience? What does that kind of look like to collect the data?
Marc Bernstein 7:12
Yeah, so fundamentally, what we do is we go down to the absolute smallest level that we can, which is sentence by sentence, question by question, value proposition by value proposition, item by item that Balto recommends? We see. First of all, Did you or did you not use this recommendation? So right, there is a data point that says this recommendation that Balto providing is used this much by these agents who are not used as much by these agents. So right there is a signal as far as how popular the item is, it's almost a human evaluation of its effectiveness. Then we say now, if the item was used, and let's say Balto recommends a question, someone asks about pricing, and one of Walters recommendations is do you see a good ROI here? Let's imagine that's the case. Then what Baltar will do is we'll say, if the representative use that question, do you see a good ROI here? What percentage of the time did it lead to a successful call outcome? So we actually have call outcomes labeled either through customer data that we can ingest right into our system, or we actually have a proxy we call the wind marker, which essentially, is a proxy for whether or not the call was successful or unsuccessful. And we're able to say what percent of the time was assessable call outcome when this recommendation was used? So now every single recommendation not just has the human element? Was it used or not? But it has a data element of what percentage of the time does it lead to successful outcomes. And then we give the human element one more ability to have a say, and we actually allow agents to vote with the thumbs up or thumbs down on the effectiveness of every recommendation. So we have a data layer there. So that's essentially saying out of all the stuff Balt is recommending, what are agents finding useful and what are agents not finding useful? And then it becomes a whole other question of how we source the best content from agents that isn't currently being recommended by Balto.
Dave Costenaro 9:27
Okay, so I think I'm what I'm gathering is that speech to text algorithms are a workhorse of your solution, right? That you're transcribing in real time, what the the people on the phone are saying and putting up there. And then like giving options, we're creating recommendations based on that. Exactly. Right. Okay. And so the recommendations then, are they you know, canned things that an expert might enter beforehand, or are they coming dynamic Based on some sort of matching and search algorithm based on the text,
Marc Bernstein 10:07
I think out of those two options, I would probably say it's closer to the to the cans that next group would have ahead of time. But it is contextual. So it's a canned response, the next part would have based on whatever a dent event was identified in that moment. Now, of course, you can imagine that as we continue to develop this, we want to start to, you know, essentially, our vision is can we make Balto, your Netflix for sales and customer service conversations? Where when you log into Netflix, and it's yours, it feels like yours? All the recommendations are things that you would watch videos you would watch? And can we have everything that balter recommends, be things that you would like to use and say. So we imagine this very hyper personalized experience, where you're pulling from the community, all of the different recommendations that are being used and things that aren't currently being used, and recommending them to the individual, in this like almost personalized smorgasbord of the stuff that you like the most to have great customer conversations.
Fully Teasdale 11:18
And so tell us more about your customers. And my understanding is you have some larger customers, I would love to hear how you break in, you know, we hear from startups all the time that it's really hard for them to break into the sort of more, you know, big enterprise clients.
Marc Bernstein 11:37
Yeah. So what I'd start by saying is that, you know, to date, ball toes, go to market has been 100% inside sales. So we're going to continue to build out new motions, and diversify how we go to market, we think it's important as we grow, but we've built, you know, a base of well over 100 customers, and many, many millions of revenue, just from inside sales. And you know, we have enterprise customers that we visited on site once or twice in order to close the deal and did everything else on zoom. So I think when startups are say, Oh, you know, we can't do that I think the answer is, well, you can you just need a really rigid sales process. And I know people usually say rigid, in a bad way, the connotation is usually, like, inflexible, but I actually mean it in a way of, is it rigorous? Is it disciplined? Are there very clear steps where you do this and look for this result. And if this result happens, you can advance the next step. So rigor in the sales processes is the real key. And then, you know, we generate our business and very standard ways, you know, we have an outbound program that's calling on our best target accounts to help bring them in. And then we have an inbound program where folks who organically find us, you know, we route you to an intro meeting and a demo and bring you through our standard sales process.
Fully Teasdale 13:09
Super cool. And can you share, like a percentage of how much of your business is that sales track versus customer support?
Marc Bernstein 13:20
Yes, right now, it's actually around 85 1585 sales 15 support? And, you know, one of the reasons is, that's actually kind of part of our strategy where, you know, sales tends to have more purchasing power, bigger budgets, and the ROI is so easy. Because, you know, you go to a sales leader, and you say, your folks are going to do a better job on their calls, will that make you more money? And the answer is, of course it will. That's easy. And then what we use that momentum to pull through to the customer service or because will prove really great results in sales and customer service says, Well, we'd love to improve cset and improve efficiency. And we say, Aha, well, we got some solutions there for you too. And then, you know, one of the things that we're so excited about is that the new real time QA product we released just a few days ago, actually on August 9, and that real time QA product scores 100% of calls in real time. So whatever your establish criteria is it provides a score item by item and then aggregates it for the call. So whereas QA departments previously were listening to maybe two to four calls per agent per month that they were lucky and saying Well, I hope these two to four calls are representative of the entire agent's performance. And I hope that they were done objectively and I hope that it didn't miss anything agree just that could come to bite me if I don't find it. Now you have scoring for 100% of calls, which is both more efficient because the machine is better at that. In many cases that a person is, and it's also more accurate reflective of the agent's overall performance. So releasing new products like that are really in high demand of our from our customer service segment. And we see that at 515. Coming down a little bit closer to even.
Dave Costenaro 15:19
That's cool. So yeah, so mark that that's the announcement that I've been seeing on LinkedIn, the the eight, nine, release there. So that's exciting. What I like about your solution, you're talking, a lot of our listeners are really interested in data and the collecting of data and tracking all that. And so I think it's really instructive to just like, emphasize, again, what you're saying about every interaction being tracked. And so there's really a lot of design upfront that has to go into that this isn't just something you tack on in the analytics department, it's like, how do we build our whole process such that we've got those markers to say, you know, hey, we're collecting these metrics, we're collecting these data stores? And we can say that, yes, it was a successful call, or no, it wasn't based on XYZ criteria. So I just wanted to kind of like, highlight that. Another thing that our listeners are always interested in is the tech stack. Can you tell us about like the software, the packages that you're using kind of what that looks like? Is it? Is it all cloud based? Or do you have some on premise stuff, like any specific libraries, or AI or data algorithms that you're using?
Marc Bernstein 16:28
Yeah, I can tell you a little bit about that, you know, the market is so competitive that we like to keep this stuff pretty close to the chest. But in general, what I can say is that, you know, we do our speech to text and our NLP, in the cloud, in AWS. So essentially, we have a desktop application. It's an electron application. So it's kind of hybrid, or it's a thin client, and then we shoot the audio stream up to AWS, in real time, under 100 millisecond latency. We apply our speech attached algorithm, which we started with open source libraries, and then have been customizing them for three and a half, four years. So now it's essentially a proprietary speech to text, then we also in real time, apply our proprietary NLP. And those algorithms are ours using a lot of established best practices in addition to our special concoction. And then we use that to identify events that are occurring in the call, in real time. And we'll identify an event in less than two seconds latency. And you know, people hear two seconds and they go, Oh, that's a lot. But I would say, ask Alexa, you know what the weather is outside, and then go one, two, that's it. That's how long it takes. And usually, by the way, whenever an event occurs, people kind of tack on more to their sentences. Very rarely people go tell them about your price. It's not what happens. They go. So I'd love to hear more about your pricing. So if you would dig into that, that'd be great. Boom, there's a recommendation right there. Yeah. So So under two second latency, and then it provides a recommendation right there to the agent. in real time. That's fundamentally the loop that we've built.
Fully Teasdale 18:24
I just wanted to give you kudos on your go to market strategy makes so much sense. Like you've built this really powerful tool, that in a sales environment, the ROI sounds, you know, like it can be proven very quickly. And then once you've gained trust, you can land and expand. So I think a lot of startups have, you know, so many opportunities everywhere that they have trouble focusing. It sounds like you all have really honed in on, on what works and what's going to deliver value the fastest.
Marc Bernstein 18:58
Thank you fully. It's funny. It's actually been part of our ethos since day one. When we were in a 75 square foot office, downtown St. Louis in the T rex building. And our rent was 275 bucks a month. And that included by the way all you can drink coffee and co working licenses. When we were in that office on the whiteboard. We put up a single sentence that said, What is the most important thing I can be doing? Because we had seen so many startups not have focus and try to do a million different things. And they're always grinding, grinding, grinding, but not really moving. And I think that focus, especially in the early stages of the company, is one of the most important things you can do, period. Because if you can set even remotely reasonable milestones, if you set a milestone, it isn't right, but it's directionally right. And you achieve that milestone and then move on to the next one. You're great In the business, and you know, maybe it takes you one year, maybe it takes you three years. Maybe it takes you five years, but you're growing the business. I think sometimes people don't set those milestones. So they zigzag versus move in any particular direction.
Dave Costenaro 20:14
Yeah, that's really smart. Good point. Let's, let's shift gears to the most controversial section. We got jokes. Okay, yeah. So here's some terrible jokes mark that we we'd like to share with share with you. Just one of the segments that we do if you have a joke, we'd love to hear that as well. I'll kick it off here. Wind does a joke become a dad joke? When? When it's apparent? Ah. Okay, this is my favorite section. Please tell me you have at least three more. That's all. That's all I've got.
Fully Teasdale 20:57
I only have one prepared. I could wrack my brain. But I really like this one. So what are the effects on the rest of the band when a drummer comes out of retirement? Nothing.
Unknown Speaker 21:21
That could be that could be an answer. But another answer is repercussions. Ah. Oh, and then and then you do? Yeah. Dave can do it better than me. Will you do it again? There you go. Thanks, Marty. I can't say I have a joke. I wish I did. But I can tell you I was a drummer for 10 years. And, you know, everyone comments that, you know, our music our band had for me for musicians and a drummer. So, yeah, that's always the part of the joke.
Dave Costenaro 22:00
Yeah, we're the bassist. I played bass for several years in a band go. Yeah, I'm with you, Matt. Rhythm Section. Yeah. We got this. Good stuff. Cool. All right. So our next segment here, we call it the magic wand. If you could wave an imaginary magic wand and make one thing better with regard to the work that you're doing, maybe remove a barrier or implement something or like make something a certain way, just to get the critical mass and get over the hill on that thing, make things better? What would that one thing be?
Marc Bernstein 22:37
It would be a very simple explanation of what we do. That is both high enough level that that, you know, CIOs and CTOs. And, you know, see our rows go, Oh, yeah, that's gonna totally move our organization, but also low enough level that people get it and that they can visualize it. And we've been working for that tantalizing messaging, that tantalizing expert explanation for years, and I think we're getting close. But boy, how nice would it be? If in just one, you hear about it, the elusive like, oh, give me your one sentence. And the one sentence, you know, the real question is one sentence for who? So if there were a magic wand, I could wave that was the one sentence for everyone. I would wave that one right now.
Dave Costenaro 23:32
Hmm. That's good. Yeah, it makes me just think and reflect on most of the problems that we're solving nowadays, I feel like are just so like multivariate. They're so complex, that distilling it down is often so hard, because you got all these different discipline disciplines kind of coming together. And yeah, if it's, if it's easy, it's not a problem that people are like, actively working on as much.
Marc Bernstein 23:58
Yeah, it's so complex. And I'll even talk about for a second, the nature of competition. You know, nowadays, you know, technology is crossing over different verticals and spaces more than ever. So the question of what market Do you play in even finding the market is kind of fuzzy now because everyone is in each other's market, right? Look at you know, Salesforce, and I know Salesforce is in the CRM space, but they're also like in the contact center. They're also in communications and telephony. And how crazy is it that a company is bridging that many spaces, and we're seeing folks like, you know, zoom, acquire five, nine. And that's an example of what you might think of as like a b2b communications company for the most part of acquiring a C CAS or contact center technology company. This merging of spaces makes it very difficult when someone says here your competition or who you can Pete with most often to answer that question in a sentence, because usually people ask and I say, Well, you know, who we compete with most often is this company. But you know, who we think is the largest competitive threat of a technological perspective is this company, but who we think is the largest threat from a market share in mind share perspective? Is this company? Yeah, it's, there's just no one answer for things anymore. At least that's me. And I'm feeling
Dave Costenaro 25:27
as crazy here. Right? I mean, technologies like like this, if you're, if it's on the internet, if it's on the cloud, if it's using data, those types of things are so horizontal, that's like something that that we think about a lot on this shows? Yeah, I mean, you do something for industry x, it can usually apply to industry why in you know, Data Set Data Science cloud, this type of SAS technology stuff headed, that's an interesting point in the competition.
Fully Teasdale 25:57
I have to think that the, you know, the consumers, the folks who are buying and looking for these services are hopefully getting used to hearing that and understanding that. You know, what works for healthcare may also work for education, and what works for finserv may also work for consumer electronics. It's just, it is it is it's a strange time. And your point is so valid, that that complexity makes it really hard to come up with like your 62nd elevator pitch.
Marc Bernstein 26:30
Yeah. So fully, then the question that kind of comes to mind for me is, you know, do you do a vertical by vertical approach? Or, you know, do you just say we serve everyone. And I think the advantages to a vertical by vertical approach are, especially with AI, NLP NLU technology, where you want to be able to understand a particular area, you want to be able to understand a type of conversation or different types of speech or a lingo, it's really important to have some sort of focus or concentration in different verticals. But then you ask the question of, well, what kind of businesses need excellent customer conversations? Pretty much every business. So it's this constant pull between wanting to go wide and making sure that you're addressing the full market you can address while at the same time getting the biggest bang for your buck by building up really good models, industry, by industry, building up credibility, industry, by industry, and building up a network industry by industry. So that tug of war is a pretty interesting question that I think folks didn't have to wrestle with as much, even 10 years ago. Yeah.
Fully Teasdale 27:54
All right. Um, we also have a section called smorgasbord a segment that has really nothing to do with what we've talked about so far. It's just to get to know you a little better. So we are going to throw a couple of totally out there questions your way. And the first one is, what's one memory from childhood? That got you interested in entrepreneurship? How did you get on this path?
Marc Bernstein 28:24
Hmm. So I think probably the thing that I really liked the most would be I think it would be like you individual sports. And the reason is that I love the concept of finding where your personal barrier is, like, how far can you take yourself in any particular area. And I think that that drive for self improvement opens up like infinite number of worlds around self improvement, intellectually self improvement, emotional emotionally and self improvement terms of being able to communicate and connect with others and try new skills. And when I, as I grew up, when I think about what kind of career path I wanted, I actually originally was interested in medicine. And I did pre med at Wash U, which, my goodness is like the hardest thing in the world. You know, and when I weighed how hard premed was with the amount of schooling that I would need to do in order to get a medical degree, and then also combine that with the fact that I felt like I wanted to be able to experience many different areas. Like it was funny I, when I started at Wash U, I said I definitely want to do something in business and medicine and The fact that I knew I wanted to do something in business and I was like, oh, that will just be my backup. And then I realized that that was actually what I wanted, I think, is a really special experience. So, you know, I was on a rowing team, which is very much a team sport. But your, you know, your individual capabilities, you know, that the team sport is that every individual is giving their maximum effort. And you can measure it very, very clearly. So I think that those who have experiences with with sports and with, you know, pushing your individual potential is what made me really love how, how many different ways you can challenge yourself with entrepreneurship. Awesome. Yeah.
Dave Costenaro 30:50
Next question, Mark. What is your weirdest phobia?
Marc Bernstein 30:54
don't like being submerged in water. I can be submerged in water. I can do it. But I don't like it. So on the rowing team, Mo would stay on the boat. That's it. I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be on top of this thing. But it's funny because Dave, you know, I grew up in the Washington DC area, and there was a big kayaking scene there. So because there's this Potomac River and Great Falls, and you know, people were cocked down waterfalls, that kind of thing. So I grew up doing quite a bit of kayaking, in which part of the experience of kayaking you know, in whitewater is that you do flip over. So I would I would do that. And I would flip over and I would be like, Oh my god, I have like 10 seconds. Before I have to get back to land otherwise, I'm out of air. That concept of having a timer kind of going off until you need to be back into air. That's, that's freaks me out a little bit. Yeah, I hear that.
Fully Teasdale 31:59
You could practice you know, I I lived in Miami for a bit and knew a bunch of free divers who you know, speaking of like, self endurance and, and, and self improvement, they would train hardcore on their breathing and their, you know, ability to hold their breath and they could go minutes, it was crazy.
Marc Bernstein 32:24
That is precisely the scariest thing in the world to me.
Fully Teasdale 32:30
I hear you I have my phobia is related, which is I don't like I don't like being near manmade things in water. Like I'm finding a pool. But in if I'm in like a lake or an ocean, I do not want to be if I'm by a boat or a pier or anything like that. I get really freaked out. I'm gonna get stuck under it. So
yeah. Or that propellers? gonna chop your arm off something like that? Yes, yes. Which did happen to a friend of mine. And basically, he had to have 70 stitches on, he fell off the back of a boat. Oh, but we're getting off topic. But I can see why that's where your fear came from? Or at least contributed to it. Ding Ding Dang, we were only like five. You're exactly right. All right. Dave, will you do the next one?
Dave Costenaro 33:20
Let's do it. Okay, what mystery? Do you wish you knew the answer to?
Marc Bernstein 33:27
Hmm. I would love to know what's going on with the UAP UFOs? Hey, it's no one really. Okay. We had this big build up around the Pentagon release. And they released the port. And now it's been radio silence for a month. Like, let's let's keep figuring out what's going on there. Yeah, yeah, I hear that. Yeah. What do you think it is? Well, I mean, it's obviously like one of the biggest mysteries of the universe since humankind started. And the fact that there's cave paintings that even look like it could be, you know, UFO related, like, at the very least, people have great imaginations. It's either at the very least people have amazing imaginations have been picturing this and putting this in lower for, you know, 1000s of years, or we saw stuff. My guess is when you go historically, it's mostly lower. I don't think that we had little green people walking around doing peace signs, and that the cave people are Oh, cool. I'm going to go paint that. But I think that when you look at the Pentagon report, you know, there were 100 of these numbers gonna be approximately correct. But I think slightly off a little bit 140 cases that were unidentified, they simply had no explanation for. And then out of those 140, they were able to say that something like 120 were very clearly not weather balloons, and they all like had very uncommon trajectories out of the 100 120 with the ability to rapidly accelerate with no visible propulsion, or exhaust system. And, and the Pentagon report said that they are not likely radar blips or, you know, malfunctions in equipment or weather phenomenon, that there's some actual thing that's moving at a crazy trajectory in the air. And there's often multiple observers where there's a machine observer. And a human observer both seen these things together. So I think that what the Pentagon report is saying pretty clearly, if you just read it to the letter of the report, is there's crazy stuff flying around in the air in ways that we have no idea how to explain. That's what the report says. So then the question is, what is the crazy stuff? And I think that we should figure that out? Yeah, yes. Yeah. That's interesting.
Fully Teasdale 35:59
It's so interesting. I agree. That is my, if I could know anything, it would be that. Okay. Last question. If someone were to gift you $100,000 in shares of any company on Earth, that you could not sell for 20 years, and it isn't Balto? What company would you want it to be?
Marc Bernstein 36:22
Definitely space related? Yeah, definitely space related. I think that with any AI company, the potential for a breakthrough is so astronomical that you need to diversify across many companies in order to make that bet properly. I don't think it's like put it all in IBM. And hopefully, Watson gets smart enough that achieves general intelligence. And that's the new, you know, king or queen of AI. I think that AI is going to be a little bit more of a bet in that way. But I think that, for example, SpaceX, like there's an a, a giant economy of space that has yet to be tapped. And we don't really know what it is. But we know that satellites are useful. We know that asteroids have valuable things on them. And we know that we have the ability to send people into space and safely get them back and at the cost of doing so is continuously getting lower and lower. So I think either a space company like SpaceX or some sustainable energy company has Honestly, I don't think we're gonna have a Dyson Sphere anytime soon, wrapping the earth in some solar technology, but I do think that we're going to have something very close to perpetual renewable energy in our lifetimes. Even with that fusion, or some enhancements in nuclear, so I do think something in the energy space also like there will be a complete world changing breakthrough there in our lifetimes. And investing in that probably would make sense. I don't quite know which company it would be, and I don't want to be too much of an Elan, Musk, fangirl or fanboy and say Solar City Tesla, but maybe that's my bet right now. Right. Oh, nice.
Dave Costenaro 38:21
Good stuff. Well, Mark Bernstein, founder and CEO of Balto, this has been awesome. Conversation learned a lot. Thanks for coming on the program. We'd like to give our guests the last word. Is there something mark that you want to say or leave with or something that you want to promote or that we didn't cover?
Marc Bernstein 38:39
Yeah, thanks so much. I would just say if anyone's more interested in learning about Balto, you can find us at Balto.ai and you can also connect with me on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/in/Balto CEO.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai